


soup snakes, 2:37am

by Ashling



Category: American (US) Actor RPF, The Office (US) RPF, US Comedians RPF
Genre: F/M, POV B.J. Novak, Pining, Quiet
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-25
Updated: 2018-12-25
Packaged: 2019-09-17 23:19:36
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,563
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16983705
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ashling/pseuds/Ashling
Summary: He likes it when she’s gentle, but he hates this part.





	soup snakes, 2:37am

**Author's Note:**

  * For [sophiahelix](https://archiveofourown.org/users/sophiahelix/gifts).



> Happy Yuletide, sophiahelix! I tried to hit at least one of your big likes, hope you enjoy!  
> Much love to [salazarastark](https://archiveofourown.org/users/salazarastark) for beta reading.

B.J. jerks awake to the light, to his name. Mindy’s there, kicking off her heels in the entryway, white collared shirt a little wrinkled beneath a bowtie, pink blazer, and pencil skirt, one hand steadying herself on the wall as she peels off her nylons, and he’s immensely grateful that just then that she’s not looking at him. He throws the blanket off him, sits up on the sofa, and reaches for his phone.

By the time he finds his phone wedged between the second and third cushions of the sofa, Mindy has both shoes off and is standing in front of him, looking down at him in a way that’s hard to figure out since she’s backlit by only the entryway light.

“What happened to Rosa?” she says.

Oof. He remembers the look Rosa gave him when she showed up at three-thirty and he told her to take the night off. He was expecting annoyance, maybe, that he forgot to just text her, made her drive all the way up to Hancock Park for nothing. He’s used to annoyance on her weathered face (justified, usually, because he finds Kat far more persuasive than she does, and destructive amounts of sweets are the result). But there was no annoyance this time, just pity instead.

“I don’t know,” he says, fumbling. “Something about quitting? She said the kid was a delight, but the mom was so high-strung. Wouldn’t let the kid get vaccinated, so she got the measles. _And_ a strict vegan. Such a Hollywood mom.”

“Hollywood mom, sounds about right.”

There’s a note in her voice he didn’t want, doesn’t ever want, and he starts to his feet with a _hey,_ but she’s already waving him off with one hand and disappearing upstairs.

It’s 2:37 in the morning. The two smiling faces on his phone screensaver are obscured by a staggering number of notifications. A hundred and seven notifications in the last thirteen hours, and this is _after_ he went through an app purge just a few days ago. He curses, scrubs his face with one hand, and then goes in for the one contact he’d most like to avoid.

There’s only one message from him: _They liked what we had and agreed to reschedule for Tuesday. Seems promising. See you tomorrow, hope everything’s alright. JT_

He can feel his shoulders relaxing just reading it. It’s nothing short of a miracle: he didn’t manage to fuck up.

Mindy’s taking a long time upstairs, and that’s understandable. That’s good. Maybe Kat’s still awake, through no fault of his own, and has managed to cajole another book reading out of her mom. Maybe he’s too old to sleep on sofas anymore. The ghost of an ache menaces his back. He folds up the blanket, gets his briefcase, and kneels to put on his shoes, wincing at the pinch of a blister on the little toe of his left foot, a blister he didn’t know he had till just now. Shouldn’t have tried to sprint in dress shoes. Not that he had a choice—

“B.J.?” she says, and he almost falls over, feeling foolish and caught for no reason at all.

“You should wear a bell around your neck, you know that?”

“Where do you think you’re going?” she says, teasing a little, but curious too, like his departure genuinely requires justification.

B.J. abandons dignity and straightens, one shoe on and one shoe off. “Toronto to LA’s not a long enough flight. Thought you’d need more sleep.”

Mindy scoffs. “Come on, you know it’s just another night. Sleep’s a football and I’m Charlie Brown.”

“Who’s Lucy?”

“I’m Lucy too.” Mindy turns and heads for the kitchen, flicking on lights as she goes, blooming the house into peach and blue around her. He bends back down to take off his shoe.

“You’re in luck,” she calls back to him. “I got some wine earlier this week.”

He trails after her, sauntering, resisting the urge to rub his eyes. “You bought it yourself?”

“Relax, you snob. Marissa dropped a few bottles off on Monday as an early Christmas present.”

“Thank God.”

When he passes behind her to get a pair of wine glasses, she kicks backwards at him without looking, just grazing his ankle. “Ow,” he says obligingly.

Leaving both cork and corkscrew on the countertop, Mindy heads for the sofa, drinking straight from the bottle. By the time they get settled on the sofa, she’s undone that little black bowtie and undone a couple of buttons on her shirt, exposing her dark throat as she swallows and that’s. That’s. There’s probably a James Bond joke in here somewhere if he’s willing to look for it, but he’s not.

As soon as he puts down both glasses, she swings her legs around and rests her feet on his lap. He leans back, adjusting under the weight, and catches her looking him up and down.

“Are you on a diet?” she says.

“What?” And he should know better when she uses that teasing voice, but the thing is, he’s been trying to go to the gym four times a week for the last month, so he’s got decent reason to feel proud right before she squashes it.

“These lapels look starved.” She reaches, rubs the wool between two fingers, and he looks down at himself and remembers.

It’s his best-fitting blazer in a grey that matches his eyes and straight-leg blue jeans, both completely overpowered by a shirt he stole from her bureau, a souvenir of some Dartmouth club with a massive yellow smiley face against a bright green background, garish and worn-out at the same time. He was going to leave the house in this. Jesus.

“The skinny lapels, yeah,” he repeats. “‘Cause that was the part of the outfit that needed work.”

“So what happened?” She hands him a glass and pours as she talks. “Before you broke into my house and started wearing my clothes, you perv.”

He takes a long sip, shrugs. “Nothing. After we FaceTimed you, we came home. I think it was too much of a mess for the teachers to organize, not to mention it was less than two hours to the end of school, so they just let parents and nannies take their kids home early. Checked IDs, of course. They almost didn’t accept my driver’s license because it’s two months outdated.”

Kat had impatiently demanded that Mrs. Plainfosse let her go already because B.J. had promised he was going to read her _The Book With No Alphabet_. That had helped. But he doesn’t bring it up, because it feels like bragging.

He can feel Mindy processing this, and he purposely doesn’t look over.

“Was she scared?” Mindy says eventually.

“No, she loved it. She thrives on chaos, like her mother.”

“She looked scared.”

“That’s my fault. I was a little frazzled. She was fine before I got there and she was fine as soon as we hung up. By the time we got our ice cream, she’d forgotten about the whole thing.”

Thanks to her legs across his, B.J. can feel it when Mindy relaxes into the sofa. It’s the best feeling in the world.

“So you didn’t go home after you FaceTimed me,” she says, amused.

“Salt & Straw is on the way home. It doesn’t count as a detour. I needed it, I was sweating so much.”

“Liar.” She gets up and heads for the fridge, just as he knew she would. “You’re saying that in the ten steps between the air-conditioned car and the air-conditioned school, you started sweating?”

“It was more than ten steps. That’s why I had to borrow a shirt, by the way. Sweat and ice-cream stains.”

“Sure, Jan.”

She returns to the sofa with a bounce and chocolate chip cookie dough ice cream.

“Where’s my spoon?” he says.

“Get your own pint, this is my dinner. Beats leftover lo mein, or having to cook.”

“I _bought_ that.”

“And?”

“I’m going to get a second spoon.”

“You’re going to lose a finger.” She puts her feet up on the coffee table and picks up her phone, licking a stray bit of ice cream off her thumb. He’s happy.

When he returns just a couple minutes later with a warm bowl in his hands, she fixes him with the strangest look. “TMZ says you have a secret lovechild,” she says.

“Fuck,” he says lightly. “I guess I always knew this day would come. Do they say how old it is? I hope it’s a girl.”

 _“Devoted Daddy: B.J. Novak Sprints Out Of Netflix Negotiations To Save Secret Son After School Bomb Scare._ I thought you and Jeremy didn’t have the Netflix meeting till Thursday.”

“Out of that whole headline, it’s the date of the meeting that bothers you? They moved it up for some reason.”

Mindy’s already scanning onwards, ignoring him. “They’re quoting your Uber driver. Why did you even mention the bomb scare?”

“No one’s gonna buy the story. I couldn’t have sprinted from the Netflix building all the way to the school if there was an Uber driver in-between. There’s already structural inconsistencies.”

The truth is, he was trying so hard not to throw up in the car, he was lucky he’d had enough presence of mind to lie about a son. Put that down to instincts borne from the merciless drilling of a decade’s worth of interviews: he’d rather eat a cactus than try to explain to a stranger what exactly Mindy is to him, let alone Kat. Even while he’s slotting Kat’s name into one of the only two prayers he remembers from childhood.

As for the running, that part’s kind of true. There was a car accident just four blocks from the school, so he abandoned the Uber there and then and got a blister and a weird look from Kat’s teacher for his troubles. It’s one of his vices, impatience. One of many.

When Mindy finishes the article and looks at him, he’s got his guard all the way up.

“What’s that?” she says.

“Mac and cheese,” he says, far more flatly than he needs to.

He can see the flicker of recognition in her eyes, and he doesn’t flinch, but it comes to him very clearly: this is unfair.

This is unfair because he would have run panting in the L.A. sun for Kat whether or not he was in falling in love with her mother for roughly the sixteenth time. Everything about this, from her feet in his lap to her old sleep t-shirt under his best blazer, would be the same if he wasn’t in love with her.

It’s also unfair because the number of times he’s fallen in love with her and the number of times he’s been able to get over it are two numbers that never seem to quite match up.

“It’s out of a box,” he adds, as if that’s a defense. _I can’t be in love with you, I made mac and cheese from a box._

Predictably, it doesn’t help. He drops all pretenses and puts the bowl down on the coffee table. “I’m going,” he says. Doesn’t even bother to add, _it’s late._ What would be the point? He heads for the door.

“But who’s gonna help me finish this bottle?”

“I think you can handle it,” he calls back over his shoulder

“Are you calling me an alcoholic?” Her voice is smaller when it’s coming through an archway like that.

“Yes. Also, I better deal with this PR fiasco. So much of my brand is built around being an elitist asshole, I don’t think I’ll survive more than a week of this endearing dad rumor.”

“It’s really good wine,” Mindy says, and fuck, she’s snuck up on him again in those polka-dotted socks, seems to have teleported from living room to entryway. Her brown eyes are gentle. He likes it when she’s gentle, but he hates this part. “Don’t you like Malbec?”

“I like Malbec a lot,” he says. “But I need to be seen wearing tweed at a strip club now, or something. Think of my career.”

“Okay,” she says quietly.

Now for the worst (best) part. It’s a ritual by now, proving to each other that they’re going to still be friends through the occasional hurricanes of their bad timing. No, his. His bad timing. He’s the one that hasn’t broken the habit of falling in love all over again at what feels like the drop of a hat. One of these days, he’ll have to ask her how she did it. It’s annoying that she’s the first person he always asks for advice, and she’s also the person he needs advice about the most.

It’s embarrassing that it’s just him now, but there’s no point in pretending otherwise.

(In his defense, he barely remembers when he noticed it was happening. It might have been three weeks ago, he thinks. He’d had whiskey in anticipation of the red carpet and she’d lifted her hair to let him clasp a web of silver and pearls at the nape of her neck, and that had been bad enough, but then she’d cracked an unbelievably dirty joke about the Red Sox winning the World Series and he’d dropped the necklace. Scrambling for pearls on the bathroom floor is a weird place to remember that you’re in love with your best friend, but there’s not really a good place to do it, is there?)

She’s good at this, as she’s good at everything: warm, unhesitating. Despite the long flight, her hair smells fresh and sweet, a little like sea air and cucumber for no goddamn reason. He holds her close, because he can and because he’s supposed to. Proving to each other that they’re still going to be friends, as if there was ever any other option.

B.J. breaks the hug first, like that means anything.

“What are you doing Saturday?” she says. “We could have lunch.”

“Can’t,” he says, “I let slip I was reading Plato at Hanukkah and I got guilted by my cousin into making an appearance at his philosophy club.”

“How old is he?”

“Twenty-two. It’s a college club.”

“Oh,” she says, equal parts horrified and amused.

“Yeah, well, I was a little drunk. And it’s not often I get to experience bukkake in real time.”

Mindy’s eyes light up the same way every time B.J. lands a joke, and that still feels good, every time. It’s one of the only constants he has in life, one of the only constants he cares about.

While she’s still laughing, he slips away with a smile and a quick, “I’ll text you.” He shuts the door carefully behind him.

Outside, the night chill is worsened by a brisk wind, and he remembers that he left his button-down hanging up on her drying rack, but oh well. He starts up the car, puts on Spotify, and fully indulges in a long midnight drive to some Top 40 songstress whose voice breaks into real feeling in two or three places. There’s no one here to judge him. What the hell.

When he gets to his apartment, waiting for the elevator, he checks his phone out of habit. Fourteen new notifications, one of them a text from Mindy.

He opens it and smiles.


End file.
